FORUM: Zero emission standards do not burden buyers

Your recent editorial has it backward (Feb. 10 editorial,
"Don't burden buyers"
). The California Air Resources Board's new zero-emission requirements don't burden buyers. Rather, they are a boon to consumers, national security and efforts to break our dependence on foreign oil.

The Zero Emission Vehicle program, one of the elements of the new clean-car package, will deliver Californians greater choices in the cars they drive, and how they are fueled.

By promoting cars with no tailpipe emissions, it accelerates investment in advanced energy-efficient, low-carbon vehicle technologies: plug-in hybrids such as the Chevy Volt, battery electric cars such as the Nissan Leaf, and fuel-cell vehicles such as the Honda Clarity. When these advanced propulsion system become cost-competitive, the zero-emission vehicle program will disappear.

By 2025, cars will use about half as much gasoline as today's models, saving consumers $5 billion in fuel costs. Benefits include reducing our need to import petroleum from abroad. (More than 40 percent of each barrel of domestic crude oil is used to make gasoline.) The results are less money flowing into the hands of unfriendly regimes and improved national security.

Indeed, no one is hungrier for a dependable supply of domestic alternative fuels than our military leadership.

California is taking this leadership role because transportation accounts for 40 percent of our climate-changing emissions and half or more of local air pollution.

As a San Diego County Supervisor and member of the Air Resources Board, I have grown to appreciate the state's catalyzing role in clean air and automotive technology.

At our recent California Air Resources Board meeting, not a single automaker opposed the Zero Emission Vehicle program. They understood that setting the standard to meet our long-term health, air quality and climate goals also coincided with their manufacturing goals and the market's direction.

Now our advanced clean car rules will do the same for plug-ins and fuel-cell cars ---- or even as-yet unknown zero-emission technologies. No one is required to buy a model or a technology that doesn't fit his or her lifestyle.

We should applaud car manufacturers for supporting our regulation, and for demonstrating over the past decade impressive achievements in clean technology. Our new zero-emission rules will unleash even more of that creative engineering and build on the billions of private dollars already invested in battery-electric and fuel-cell technology.

Having affordable zero-emission cars on our roads and highways will also help reduce local climate emissions 13 percent by 2035, as committed to in the
Sustainable Communities Strategy
recently adopted by the San Diego Association of Governments.

With experts projecting gas at $5 a gallon this summer, it is good to know that the Air Board's new rules will speed up the arrival of even more efficient cars and help lessen our dependency on foreign oil.